The government shutdown that wasn't

6:36 PM,
Oct. 18, 2013

Park Ranger Scott Rolfes locks a gate closing a road over the dam at Saylorville Lake in Iowa. About 800,000 federal workers were forced off the job in the first government shutdown in 17 years, suspending most nonessential federal programs and services.

Written by

David Masciotra

A couple of months ago, I wrote about what Freidrich Hayek called the "perversion and despoiling of language." Hayek's diagnosis of a political culture that loses all relevance once its rhetoric becomes fraudulent applies to contemporary American politics, and it appears that the condition is bordering on terminal.

As if the widespread use of the phrase "jobless recovery" wasn't enough to validate Hayek's case, the government "shutdown" gave the country a new vocabulary that functions as a tribute to sloppy articulation and what George Orwell famously condemned as "Newspeak." In ...